Old Clown Wanted, by Matei Vişniec, new premiere at NTB, in the Studio Hall, directed and conceived for the stage by Ion Caramitru, shall bring on stage (but also in the hall and foyer) the display of the impossible, the encounter with absolute illusion and the mirage of boundless freedom. Everything, in an enactment filled with humour, delicacy, tender cynicism, soulful stunts, in which theatre and circus are intertwined on the common realm of the spectacular.

Three old clowns, Nicollo, Filippo and Peppino, meet in front of a hiring notice, ready to give their best for the last trick, the supreme frolic over which the last curtain may fall. The body is playing tricks on them, but the mind is vibrating, hypnotising, and the remembrance of past glory turns the whole world into an extravaganza, into a miraculous manège, a surrealist scenery.

The audience is an amused accomplice in this adventure, a game of life and death in which nothing is what it seems to be, and the theatre hall transforms itself, unknowingly, into a circus ring, where you can find fantastic characters, but also your own stray dreams.

Old Clown Wanted gives the spectators the occasion to re-encounter three very gifted young actors of NTB: Petre Ancuţa, Emilian Mârnea and Florin Călbăjos, whom you could discover in the concert-show ActOrchestra (directed by: Horia Suru), but also in Magic Naţional (where they performed also under the coordination of Ion Caramitru). This time, they shall be the illusionist-artists, expressive and surprising, combining music, pantomime, magic and charming performance in order to build characters at the threshold between reality and fantasy.

The play Old Clown Wanted is the last written by playwright Matei Vişniec before leaving Romania, and in 1991 it received the UNITER Award for best Romanian play.

"Through the presence of the three young actors Emilian Mârnea, Petre Ancuţa and Florin Călbăjos, adorable in the roles of the old clowns, conquering through genuineness and comic inventiveness, the show debuts in a joyful atmosphere, only sometimes sad, according to the redempting philosophy of laughter as crying. The playful conceit, the candid overestimation, emphases and the professional trials which they simulate puckishly are just as many occasions for the three to prove their mastery in the art of gag, of improvisation and the tragicomic game on the edge, with a well controlled presence of mind in the transition from one state to another. Against the background of a special native endowment with multiple skills from scenic intelligence to humour and furthermore musicality, mindful that the three form an exceptional instrumental and vocal trio, they attract sympathy from the start, whereas their authentic performance, the territorial playfulness assigned to the difficult characters they must enact, bring them a categorical success which shall mean enormously in their future career.

"Petre Ancuţa, Emilian Mârnea and Florin Călbăjos prove that they can transform – under the lens of the director’s sensibility – the spectacle of death into a bitter clownery.

The tragic guilt of the clowns (Nicollo, Filippo, Peppino) – individuals stemming from the “great anonyms”, interchangeable, thus anti-heroes, related to Kafka’s characters (Joseph K.), Dürrenmatt (Alfredo Traps) or Ionesco (Béranger) – is nothing else than the ontological one. Descended, seemingly, from Fellini’s movie, the three clowns are equally “everybody”, but also “nobody” - “Anyone can be Peppino. There are thousands of Peppinos. Everyone can be Peppino.” The topic of the current enactment is that of the mortifying stagnation, of the suspension in inactivity, in waiting – understood as a fundamental existential attitude, both alienating and salvaging, as well as of the vicinity with death.

Of a special aestheticism, Old Clown Wanted awakens, moves, incites and encourages meditation.

„Old Clown Wanted” at NTB is a bet. It is an ambitious concept. The collaboration with the Globus Circus and the oversized scale of a play with three characters is impressive, to say the least. The sparks like sequins of these effectual artifices play their part well in the show.

"Two acts in two different spaces. Two worlds in which three lives struggle to accept their existence. And in order to succeed to lead their lives where no one can consciously arrive.

The three clowns – epic (Petre Ancuţa, Florin Călbăjos, Emilian Mârnea) draw conclusions throughout the entire „employment” regarding the significance of the acting art – how acting imposes a rigour on oneself, a mental and physical flexibility, a tolerance for the relationships which are born with regard to the audience, but also with one’s own body and mind.

Fellini, your clowns have changed for the better. And Mister Vişniec is partly to blame. As for Mr. Caramitru, he bears the rest of the guilt. As for us, the viewers, we can declare ourselves already hired. Because we are all clowns on whom very little is said, but wanted by life, at its right or left, as appropriate".

"The enactment has, above all, a construction dynamics, in the sense that it is structured into three parts (the pause representing actually a mini-circus show). Practically, the show is continuous, and the public is invited and borne to the fascinating world of the circus – from the arena, but also behind its curtains.

... in the last part, we are joining the three candidates in the arena, for the practical part. And here, Ion Caramitru outdoes himself.

...the director creates a magical realm in which candour and nostalgia reign, a world between the dreamlike and the burlesque, fascination and stage fright, thriller and metaphysical shiver. In this spacious arena of life and death, corporality becomes hieratic, the masks drop for a moment, heads turn toward the past, the childhood becomes the most dangerous game, whose consequences are pushed up to the end, where there are no more winners, everything is crystalline and cold. It is the aisle through which – due to our carelessness – death pervades. Yes, her, Death – the most accomplished coup.

The moment in which spectators pass from one to another the giant balls thrown by the clowns from the stage and the entire hall becomes an arena where all of us are clowns and acrobats and tamers, represents the most moving demonstration of “involuntary” theatre we have ever experienced. A gesture loaded with meaning and artistic generosity, an incredibly subtle, discrete and deliberately delicate directorial act. It is the moment when no spectator finds himself by chance in the hall. You are there because you want to be, to act, to play, in the hall, in the arena, on the stage, in life.

Old Clown Wanted is a show washing your soul and telling a lot about the force of our frailness, about the seductive burden of innocence which we cannot renounce like Atlas could not shed the celestial sphere thrown onto his shoulders. ".

"Ion Caramitru creates a fascinating show on a new text version. He attempts and fully succeeds to configure the theme of the play as a tribute to the clown artist, a “total artist”.

The attractive and functional scenery by Florilena Popescu Fărcășanu defines each of the acting spaces. The image of the show also gains in glamour through the costumes of the clowns, created by Liliana Cenean with fantasy, minuteness up to the detail of the buttons or the special shoes. These are costumes “talking” and colouring the retort or the situations depicted by the clowns, also complemented by an inspired make-up. A major role for the spectacularity of the image is played by Chris Jaeger, the handler of lights like a true visual artist. Florin Fieroiu surprises through an original choreography, modern in expression and specific for the allure of the clowns.

This theatrical packaging is turned to profit by the three wonderful actors, Petre Ancuța, Emilian Mârnea and Florin Călbăjos, in the typologically differentiated roles of the clowns. (...) They prove to be those rarely encountered “total actors”. They sing vocally, but also play different instruments, dance, do pantomime, but can also perform comic or dramatic parts, with an immaculate interior construction. Director Ion Caramitru, who is also a great actor, knew how to highlight the multifaceted skills, each one’s talent to define the portrait of each clown differently.

“Old Clown Wanted” is anchored in the scarce series of sensational shows, where mature spectators recollect the joys of childhood, and the children who may escort them are amazed by the magic of clowns and the art of the circus artist. This show is also sensational in order to know and retain the names of some total artists, but also to discover the surprise of technical and modern possibilities held by the National Theatre of Bucharest, highlighted with inventiveness by director Ion Caramitru and his team".

"The director and the three actors capture perfectly the complicated relationship, both tender and fake and competitive between the clowns, nuanced exemplarily by Petre, Emilian and Florin, who capture its comic and tragic side alike".